


The Footlocker

by Jennytheshipper



Series: The Life And Death Of Sugar Candy [10]
Category: Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), Powell and Pressburger - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-18
Updated: 2013-06-18
Packaged: 2017-12-15 09:25:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/847920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jennytheshipper/pseuds/Jennytheshipper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spring 1917, the time is right to clean out the attic. What horrors will Edith find there?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Footlocker

Edith collapsed onto the sofa, pulled off her mop cap and dabbed her sweaty brow.  She pressed the cool damp of an earthenware mug to the side of her face.  Frau Heim was already in the easy chair, her feet upon a footstool, sipping her beer.  Edith didn’t much care for beer normally, but at a time like this it was refreshing.  Besides, it had been a gift from Herr Heim who was proud of his latest batch of home brew. Frau Heim sighed and unbuttoned the top button of her house dress.  A breeze blew in through the open window, cooling them.  The smell of clean floors and open windows always reminded Edith of Stolpchensee, of her weeks with Clive and Theo.  She breathed in deep, the pleasant, astringent tang of her newly scrubbed house.  A spring smell, peculiar to Germany she thought.  Spring in England was more earthy, with the musk of decaying leaves.  Herr Heim so totally obliterated their autumn leaves with sweeping and bonfires that there was precious little to rake up in the spring.  

Her attention drifted to Peter and Karl playing in the garden.  They would get dirty and have to be stripped of shoes at the door, but it was worth it to get them out of doors at last.  Karl was nestled casually in a high branch of the apple tree.  Peter was struggling to make it past the top rung of the step ladder onto the lowest bough.  When Karl had been little, she had fretted so about that tree.  Theo had boosted him up and stood underneath while Edith watched pale with fear from the window.  Boys were supposed to scrape their knees and get dirty, but falling from a tree would mean a broken bone or worse.  She’d forced herself to applaud his progress as Theo did.  How far away that anxiety seemed now. Though her calm owed as much to her tired limbs, and the heady home brew, as the wisdom of parenting one’s second child.

Frau Heim, stood up, stiffly, and stretched, looking every minute of her sixty years.  Edith rose, searching the pockets of her house dress for the money to pay Frau Heim.  She took the notes and placed them in the older woman’s outstretched hand.  It was always an awkward moment.  The Heims were her friends.  They’d stuck by when others were quick to remember her nationality.  Edith didn’t want to think about how much of that loyalty came from the fact that she paid them to do odd jobs.  Frau Heim looked at the notes briefly.  Evidently it was enough.  Edith never quite knew, and suspected she rather over paid just to avoid discussing money between friends.  

““I will send Herr Heim to help with the garden, tomorrow, yes?” 

“No, the attic tomorrow.  While it is still cool.”  Edith said with finality. If she was not firm she would end up living her life to the Heim’s schedule.  

“I have my grandchildren tomorrow.  It will be difficult to come,” Frau Heim said, annoyance creeping into her voice.

“It’s alright.  Karl has been asking for rags.  There is a drive on at school.  If he wants to win the prize, he can help.”

Frau Heim went away happy, glad of a day off with her husband and grandchildren around her.  

Edith sat down again and finished her beer.  She shut her eyes and - lulled by the distant voices of the boys at play - let her mind wander back to Stolpchensee.  She could almost conjure up that morning when she and Theo had told Clive of their engagement.  Clive’s strange kiss that she had never quite understood.  Not like kissing Theo at all.  It had been chaste, but not brotherly.  It had puzzled her more than anything else all these years.  She didn’t know how to categorize it.  Oh, she laughed to herself, but why bother sorting people into slots like letters? 

She thought with a pang of guilt of her unfinished letter to Theo, tucked into a cubby in her desk.  Through the winter she’d been so diligent in writing, so quick to put thoughts on paper, never holding anything back. “My darling the snow piles up, the boys are sledding now every day.  I miss our toboggan rides, but I do my best to stand in your stead.  Schnitzel sometimes gets out of the Heim’s yard and pulls the rope with his teeth…” But now, with the warm weather and the boys out from under foot, she always seemed to be too busy.  It had been nearly two weeks.  Theo’s letters came in the meantime as regularly as before, but now they were full of life in the camp and any news of the war that made it past the censors: “Willem has devised a method of making coffee in a picklehaub” and “our spinsters have stopped writing since the bombing in London.  They think to punish us for the Kaiser’s barbarity.” 

Perhaps that was why she couldn’t write to Theo.  With the blockade she’d had no news of her family. It seemed wrong to write to her husband and not to her mother.  To them Theo was the enemy.  Even if her letter could get through, what could she say that would possibly convince them that he didn’t have a direct line to Kaiser Wilhelm?  They were probably safe in Richmond, but the lack of news of her brothers at the front was a constant worry.  She’d charged Theo with searching the newspapers but he didn’t get a consistent supply.  There was always the chance that you could miss bad news.  It had happened a few weeks ago.  Frau Heim had missed the news that her cousin’s son had been killed at the front.She’d bumped into the cousin in town and blithely asked how the boy was.  The poor cousin was in tears and Frau Heim had sobbed the whole way home on the tram.  Such a shock, poor woman.

Edith thought with regret of the oft-talked of holiday to England they had never taken.  Theo could never get the time away or they’d spent the fare on some repair for the cottage.  Now she felt it would never happen.  The boys might never know grandparents, never know the old place by the Thames where Edith had grown up.  She’d often dreamed of showing Theo all her girlhood haunts among the reeds, imagining the trouble they’d get up to punting on a warm summer’s afternoon.  She and Theo on a raft, floating the day away.  A favorite fantasy patched together with memories of the rowing boat and the addition of bathing costumes and a sultry day.  His hands on her.  The tickle of his moustache.  The taste of his mouth.  And they might have seen Clive as well if the timing had been right.  Edith scolded herself.  She still thought about Clive too much, as often as her own brothers, really.  She couldn’t help but worry.  She ignored the German papers, but the propaganda still filtered through. If butcher shop gossip were to be believed, England was on the verge of surrender.   The war would be over soon, England would lose and what would become of her family, of Clive, then?

At least Theo was safe.  What harm could come to him in that place?  His wound had healed, and now there was only boredom, and even that was eased by being always with his men.  She half wondered if he weren’t enjoying himself a little bit.  Nonsense.  That wasn’t fair.  It was a prison.  Theo was disciplined and strong, but the enforced idleness of the long English winter would wear on him. He so loved the sun, the hot days of summer.  He had shielded her from much that was unpleasant, always remaining upbeat in his letters.  She would write, soon.  It was her duty.  She’d never felt that till now.  Before it had been a pleasure to write, but now that it was something she must do. How awful to realize that.  She would write soon, in the evening, perhaps after the boys were asleep.  That was always the time when she missed him the most.  In the daytime she could pretend he was in town at his barracks as he had been before the war, sleeping only a few nights a week at the cottage.  She had taken to letting Peter sleep in bed with her.  A bad habit, one it would be difficult to break when Theo came home.  But it helped, just to hear the boy’s steady breath in sleep and feel his paltry little warmth on Theo’s side of the bed.  Theo’s pillow smelled of Peter now.  She had tried once to recreate Theo’s smell by putting some of that awful pomade on a handkerchief under her pillow, but it was too strong, and lacked the warm undertone of Theo’s skin.

 +++

Edith and Karl sat sipping their coffee.  Karl was such a little man with his father’s cup.  Coffee was utterly foul since the war, but they still drank it on Saturdays.  It had been a ritual as long as they’d lived there, one Theo had started. Edith longed for tea.  More than a year since she had any in the house.  In the last winter she had brewed with dried herbs from the garden, but now even that pitiful substitute was gone.  

Peter was playing happily in the living room with his soldiers.  Most of his collection was converted clothes pegs that Theo had painted for Karl long ago.  But there was one proper soldier doll given to Peter by his father, Christmas of ‘13.  How much Peter had grown since then.  He’d changed so much.  Daily practically.  He had been a baby then - was still, really - chubby about the face and hands.  His usual game was to attack the big soldier with the little ones, voicing all the parts as he acted out the drama.  She and Karl exchanged smiling fond looks.  Karl swirled the dregs of his coffee and then after a pause, downed the lot.  She smiled. So like Theo, that little habit.  Everyone said the boy looked like her, but sometimes she could see echoes of his father in his profile.  

“What is this great prize at school then?” she asked, hoping to draw him out.  He was at a sullen age, so different from Peter’s constant chatter.  

“A choice between a box of candy or a set of pencils.”

“And which will you take?”

“Pencils of course.”

“That’s my boy.”  She said and put down her coffee cup.

“Shall we then?”  

“I suppose,” he said grudgingly.

“It won’t be so bad” she said, retrieving  the kerosene lantern from the table in the living room.  She lit it and handed it to Karl who held it reverently and with great care.  To give the boy a lantern was almost a compensation for press-ganging him to helping with the housework.  It made an adventure of the little trek to the loft.  Karl was tall for his age, and strong, still plump despite the best efforts of rationing to reduce them all.  The fights about his English mother in school had been short lived and decisive in his favour.  He was handsome too, with a strong jaw beginning to emerge through the baby fat.  

Edith opened the narrow undersized door that led to the loft.  The hinge screeched for oil. She made a mental note to see to it.  Mustn’t let the place fall apart because there was no man around.  Theo had always loved pottering about the house, fixing things, putting up shelves.  His projects, he called them.  He kept a list in his desk.  Edith suddenly felt her eyes swimming with tears thinking of it.  Funny how a little thing like that could make her weepy. 

Karl was at the top of the stairs waiting for her.  She rubbed her eyes quickly.

“Mama, what’s the matter?”

“Oh this dust.  It’s making my eyes water.” She said and walked quickly past him so that he couldn’t examine her face closely.  

He held up the lantern.  The room was barely passable, stacked with boxes of junk they’d collected in the thirteen years they’d lived there.  Theo never threw anything out if he could help it.  

“Good lord, what a mess!”  Edith exclaimed.  For a moment, her resolved wavered.  It would take days to go through it all.  The warmer weather would be there before she finished.  She made up her mind to sort through the old clothes and save the rest of the clear out for autumn.  

The pile of boxes nearest the stair head was the newest.  She would start at the far side of the room with the oldest things.  

 Karl set the lantern down on a pile of boxes.  The light shifted and Edith stumbled a bit, smacking her toe on something hard and metallic.  

“Ouch!  Dammit!”

“Mama!” Karl said in a tone, half-admonishing, half amused.  “Such language!” Edith giggled a bit and apologized half-heartedly.  

“We might as well start with this, then” Edith said, pointing to the box which she’d kicked.  It was Theo’s old footlocker which he’d brought back from town before he’d left for the front, shoving it in the attic with the rest of the things he was too busy to sort through.  There was a pile of old clothes on top of it.  Edith flitted through them.  They all required heavy mending or were too much out of style for Theo to bother with.  He was very particular about his clothes.  Even a bit fussy.  Edith was allowed nothing to do with them, apart from sewing on the odd button.  He bought his things from a tailor in town and trusted their care to a laundry he’d used for years.  It was the one area in which he wouldn’t hear of economizing.  He was always too extravagant about her appearance as well, buying her hats and gloves when they took his fancy in town.  He had exquisite taste and he knew what looked good on her.  She could never quite bring herself to scold him for these habits.  It was part of what she loved about him. And she liked nice things as well.  God, how long had it been since she’d had anything new?  It hadn’t even crossed her mind, in months.  Fashions came and went and she was hidden in the country under her housedress.  It just didn’t relate to her any more.  When Theo returned she would celebrate with a new dress.   

“This pile is all for the rag drive, I’m afraid.” She said heaving the lot onto a clear space on the floor.  

“Great.  That should do.  Are we done then?”

Edith laughed.  “Nice try.  We should go through the boxes looking for clothes,”  she said as she ran her hand lightly across the lid of the footlocker. Theo’s name and rank were painted there in white enamel.  He had done it free-hand, without a stencil, each letter sized and spaced perfectly without error.  There was no doubt about which parent had given Karl his artistic talent.  Careful, she warned herself.  Mustn’t get soppy again in front of the boy.

She raised the lid.  The thing was jam packed.  The top a mess of papers, newspaper clippings, correspondence, ancient and recent, all jumbled together.  She tidied them into a stack and set them aside.  For a man so fastidious about certain things, he could be shockingly disorganized.  Below this first layer was a flat, broad box, the sort used for filing small pieces of paper. She shook it and a few things rattled inside.  She suddenly felt unpleasantly like a snoop.  She set the box on top of the papers without opening it.

There were a couple of Theo’s old shirts in the next layer.  Edith threw them on the rag pile.  The necklines of all them had collar tabs.  Theo never wore collar tabs any more.  

She moved on:  a wooden rosary, a few odd coins and tram tokens, a rusty pen knife.  She looked at one of the coins.  It was foreign.  The number 50 and then some writing she couldn’t make out at all.  The face of a bearded man in profile.  He looked rather like the old King, she thought.  She held the coin up to the lantern light.   

“What is it?” Karl asked, fascinated.

“Oh, it’s Russian!” Edith exclaimed triumphantly, suddenly recognizing the strange alphabet and the features of the Tsar; and indeed he _was_ a relative of the King.  

“Why does Papa have Russian money?” Karl asked.

“He probably won it at cards.  Your father is very good at cards.  Never play him for money.”

Edith carefully picked up the medal and coins and placed them on top of the filing box.  Next was a large sheaf of papers, loosely bound with string.  She lifted it out of the locker.  Below that was another old shirt.  Edith carefully undid the string on the papers.  The outer piece was a heavy stock of drawing paper, blank, folded in half.

“Karl.  This is good paper.  You can have this.  I’m sure your father won’t mind.”

She carefully unfolded the great white piece of paper and handed it to the boy.  He beamed with satisfaction.  He might get two or three drawings out of it.  His attention was fixed on the unexpected gift, while Edith began to examine the bundle of papers.  They were charcoal drawings, figure studies.  Most were faceless backs or forearms.  The place where the shoulder and arm came together was drawn from several angles, muscles exaggerated.  She was thrilled by the idea that Theo might be the artist.  She was about to show them to Karl, burbling with pride at her husband’s unknown gifts, when she reached the last drawing of the pile.  It was a man in profile.  Theo. The face was clean-shaven, but unmistakable.  He was naked, about to stand, in the act of pulling a sheet to cover himself.   It was a shockingly familiar scene.  She’d seen it so many mornings, Theo getting out of bed.  And it was, quite clearly, drawn by someone still in the bed.  There was a name scrawled. She couldn’t decipher it, but it wasn’t Theo. Edith quickly buried the drawing among the rest, relieved at least that she had not pointed out the drawings to Karl.  A moment later she was angry, that Theo had kept such a lurid memento. She set the whole pile back in the trunk, on top of the shirt.  She wasn’t going to fuss with the rags now.  She moved quickly while Karl was occupied with his big piece of paper, and put the rest of the things back in the trunk and shut the lid. She stood and turned away from Karl, trying to compose herself.  Her heart was pounding and she was sure her face was red.  She clenched her jaw and took a deep breath, pushing the drawings out of her mind.

“Is that all?” he asked.

She turned to face him. He was looking up at her sweetly.  He had not noticed anything unusual.   

“You know, I think it is.  We have enough rags for your drive and it would take us a month to get through the rest of this.”  She said, standing and brushing dust off her hands and her housedress.

“What would you like for lunch?  I have some chicken livers from the butchers.” she added, hoping to cover her sudden change of plans.  

“I don’t suppose there is any bacon to go with it?”

“Not unless you’ve killed a wild boar that I don’t know about.  You haven’t, have you?”

Karl laughed.  “No, but Peter might have.”

“We’ll ask him shall we?”

“Peter!” Karl roared and Edith heard Peter reply, “what?” from the living room.  They laughed. 

Edith picked up the clothes for the rag drive.  Karl took up the lantern and headed downstairs.. Edith took a quick, last look around the room before following him.  The shock she’d first felt had worn off and given way to jealousy. Mustn’t allow that.  She stifled the urge to run back to the footlocker, to comb through its contents with an archeological zeal.  That would have to wait.  She forced a smile onto her face and headed downstairs after the boy.

* * *

That night Edith lay in the dark listening to the sound of Peter’s breathing as he settled into sleep. She wasn’t really going to do this, was she?  Creep up to the attic at night?  So there had been a lover.  An artist.  What did it matter if Theo had saved her drawings?  He had saved his induction notices, and copies of memos regarding new helmets for the regiment. He saved everything. 

This woman was long forgotten, Edith was sure.  The Theo of her drawing didn’t even have a mustache.  Edith sketched her own portrait of the artist.  A messy braid down the back.  A baggy smock. The sort of freedom Edith had never had.  Experienced, no doubt.  She rolled over impatiently, willing herself to sleep, but it was no use. 

She waited a few minutes more, till she was sure Karl was asleep in the next room, before she rose, put on her dressing gown and lit the lamp.  She ascended the narrow stairs to the loft as quietly and slowly as she could manage.  Karl was old enough that his mother prowling around in the loft in the middle of the night would prompt unwelcome questions, but she couldn’t wait until they were out of the house  to make her investigations. She told herself that she was merely curious, knowing, as she did, so little of Theo’s past. There could be nothing in that box for her to dread.  She was a little afraid in the attic itself, though, thinking with a shiver of someone looking into her house at night and seeing her lamp move.  The madwoman walking around.  She’d read _Jane Eyre_ often enough, she’d been a governess after all, to make the connection. 

She moved slowly toward the trunk, careful not to trip over anything, setting the light down gently, still thinking of _Jane Eyre_.  She didn’t want any fires.  God, how that book had given her nightmares when she first read it.  Waking up, certain the bed was in flames. 

She passed the window looking briefly at her own reflection . She pressed her face to the glass.  Nothing.  An inky blackness only penetrated by a sliver of light cast out of the window from her lamp.  They lived far enough out of town that there were no street lamps.  There was no moon.  Their dark was the real dark of the country.  She remembered their first night in their cottage as newlyweds.  They’d been so happy to have a garden. Lying out there with a featherbed counting the stars, feeling like the only two people in the world.  They’d made love and it was glorious to be outside and naked and not ashamed. Like the boat only more so; no worries, no sinking and all the time in the world.  The time that Theo had promised her and oh, it was lovely not to have to rush, to take time to explore him, to hold it at last in her hands, fascinated at the way it moved almost as if it had its own will. Theo’s patience, letting her explore his body and take him inside her as slowly as she could bear. Adam and Eve in the Garden she’d always thought.  Silly of her. But that was what she’d felt.

No stars tonight.  Just the light from the lantern.  She turned away from the window.  

The footlocker was there, waiting patiently for her. Now cleared of the shroud of old clothes, it was the only thing in the room without a layer of dust on it.   The white lettering of his name - her name too - shone in the lamp light.  How weepy and proud she’d been of those letters a few hours earlier.  That feeling had been supplanted with a gnawing curiosity.  Her heart was pounding in her ears, exaggerated by the unearthly quiet in the attic.  She should let the past lie.  Trust Theo.  But it wasn’t fair.  There was so much she didn’t know.

She knelt and lifted the lid.  The clippings and correspondence were on top where she’d left them.  They had seemed unimportant before, but she would dissect all of it now.  The first clipping was a piece about the Ulans which Edith had cut out for him.  It was a picture of his unit on maneuvers in Bavaria.  You couldn’t make out the faces, but it was the sort of thing you automatically saved.  She had written, “anyone we know?” neatly below the photo.  She had posted it to him at the barracks, and here the envelope was still among these things.  He threw nothing away.  She looked through the letters. They were all pertaining to orders, official memoranda and the like.  

She found the filing box which she hadn’t opened before.  That queer feeling struck her again, feeling like a spy.  A snoop.  She was violating something she shouldn’t.  She couldn’t help it.  And after all, he was her husband. There should be no secrets between them. She opened it and  dumped out the contents, all postcards.  She turned them over.  Some were blank, things Theo’d collected apparently intending to send.  The rest were from  - Clive. Edith’s face flushed hot and prickly. Clive had written to Theo.  Many times.  Why had Theo never said?  The cards were all addressed to the barracks.  Perhaps it slipped his mind by the time he was home.  She read the cards, sitting with her back against a stack of boxes.  It didn’t take long. There was nothing much there, really. A few inside jokes between friends. Here was Clive in India and the Sudan and on safari. Theo had known his movements and she had not. She was hurt that Theo had never said. Hurt, too, that Clive had not once asked about her. 

She put the cards back in the box.  She was being overly sensitive. Boys would be boys.  They would carry on their jokes.  It was nice, really, wasn’t it that their friendship had survived their marriage?  When Clive had not married Frau von Kalteneck, Edith had wondered whether he pined for her, felt bitter toward Theo.  She had almost assumed it. But apparently not.  He had written to Theo as his old self, full of warmth and still ribbing him about his moustache.   And Theo had written back, of course, probably from his barracks in the evening.  He’d made this collection of postcards for Clive.  Most were silly, some a bit racy--paintings of naked ladies, and even a male nude.

Edith picked up the bundle of drawings again.  She looked them over carefully for signatures.  They were all the same artist.  The same heavy charcoal lines, the same expert shading, the use of the merest suggestion of a line to hint at real depth.  They were really very good.  Edith felt madly jealous of this talented woman who’d had Theo before she had.  What ended it she wondered?  Lover’s quarrel?  The sketch of Theo getting out of bed was remarkable. She had captured not just his face and body, but the elusive beauty of his movements.  His graceful, swift motions, always to purpose.  To be able to draw like that, was something wasn’t it?  To recreate something Edith had seen a thousand times, a truly beautiful thing which she’d noticed but never expressed even to herself.  She looked carefully at the signature.  She couldn’t make it out.  A…something.  She turned the sheet over, seeking clues.  There was writing.  She hadn’t seen the writing before.  Those strange unfamiliar letters that Edith had seen on the coin.  Russian.  And underneath, jotted in Theo’s familiar hand, “Study for Sasha’s painting, ‘Theo in the morning,’ January ’98.”   

She turned it over and studied the sketch again.  The style was familiar, somehow.  Edith remembered one of the blank postcards in the box. She dumped them out again unceremoniously and rifled through them.  Yes, it was the same style but in a different medium.  It was a colour reproduction of a painting of a man rising to look out of a window.  You couldn’t see the man’s face, but it was Theo’s back.  She hadn’t noticed before.  Hadn’t been looking for it.  There had been no window in the sketch but the sheet pulled up looked the same.  It was the same moment painted from a different angle.  She turned the card over. “Alexander Sourov, 1898, St. Petersburg, Russia.”  She dropped the card in horror.  _Alexander_. The image of the Sasha with the messy braid had been a silly dream.  Of course, Sasha was a man’s nickname in Russia, short for Alexander.   

She tried to imagine some scenario in which Theo would share his bed with a friend.  Some platonic circumstance, but it was no use, the artist was a lover.  When she’d thought the artist was a woman, she’d reached that conclusion naturally enough.  

She felt her stomach sour, as if she might be sick.  She sat for a moment, staring at the drawing.  He seemed a stranger, this Theo, his expression suddenly twisted and cruel.  Oh God, why had she been so determined to pry into the past?  There would be no going back, either, pretending not to have seen it.  She had given the paper to Karl.  Theo was sure to notice that.  If she could not go back she would go forward.  

There was more in the trunk.  Her eye fell on the shirt she’d left before in her haste to hide the drawings from Karl.  She was about to toss it aside when she noticed that it was bigger than Theo’s other shirts.  The neck hole was two or three sizes larger than his usual.  That was odd.  Theo was so precise about his shirts.  They always fitted him perfectly.  She brought it closer to the lantern.  There was a laundry mark in the neck, “C.C”.  Initials?  This wasn’t Theo’s shirt, after all, then.  Perhaps a mix-up at the laundry?  But why would Theo have kept it all these years? The neckline was old fashioned, from the days of celluloid collars, like the others she had thrown out in the morning. She turned the shirt upside down, looking for a maker’s label in the tails.  There was one, tiny, barely readable in the dim light.  “Samuel & Sons, London W1.”  That settled it.  There could be only one person to whom the shirt could belong: Clive Candy.  But why did Theo have Clive’s shirt?  

Clive.  Here he was again, bloody Clive Candy! Would she never be free of him?  She’d held the idea of him, all these years, during the war, especially.  He’d been a connection to England.  Clive Candy never changed.  Had he been the same to Theo? A touchstone, a memory from a happier time?  Is that why Theo kept his shirt all these years?  Why  - _why_ hide a correspondence with Clive from her?  Her stomach lurched in dread.  If Theo had loved this Sasha -  had he loved Clive as well?  As more than a friend?  They had always been so close at the nursing home.  Perhaps it was a simple mix up with the shirts.  It was plausible. Hadn’t Clive almost taken home a stack of Theo’s hankies?  But why keep the shirt all these years?  She examined it more carefully, breathed in its smell.  It could do with a wash.  It stank of sweat and cigarette smoke.  No, Theo would not have kept it as mere oversight.  She thought back to her own efforts with Theo’s pomade and the handkerchief;  to her clean floors that reminded her of those days in the nursing home.  The shirt would remind Theo of Clive, his Clive, the one he’d known all those evenings that she wasn’t privy to.  Oh, God!  She squeezed her eyes shut to try to block out the image in her mind - a great hand, like that of Moses, Clive’s hand in charcoal, reaching out to the man about to rise from the bed.  The hand familiar and possessive reaching for the sheet to pull it away.  She was going mad.  The attic was playing tricks on her.  Yet it made a kind of warped sense.  

All those times she’d been so annoyed with Theo for monopolizing Clive.  And the strange way Theo had sulked after Clive had left.  A hangover that lasted two days!  Then, just when she’d begun to worry that the engagement had been a mistake, he’d found this place, the cottage, and dragged her out here on the tram.  After that, he was considerate and loving as she could wish, passionate even - stealing kisses whenever he could, counting the days till the wedding like an excited little boy.  Had he just been playing the part of a lover?  And  there was Clive’s odd behavior as well - the weeks she’d waited for him to make a move, Mariel’s failure to seduce him.  Even Theo had been genuinely convinced she would succeed.  Could it be that _Clive_ had wanted _Theo_ to monopolize his time?  

God, she had been such a fool.  Imagining Clive pining away for her all these years.  And Theo!  What mixture of pity and resignation had prompted his proposal?  All their years together, their home, their night in the garden, their children, all of it had been built on a lie.  She looked down at her hands, still gripping the shirt, twisting it unconsciously.  She stood and gathered her strength.  She would tear this shirt to scraps.  Turn it to bandages.  Obliterate all traces of the drawings.  Into the fireplace with them!  She pulled at the collar but it was too strong.  She turned it over, fumbling for the tail, looking for a flaw she could exploit.  Her hands were unsteady.  She was shaking with rage.  She glanced up and saw her reflection in the window.  She looked the madwoman now, desperate, clawing at the shirt.  She dropped it back in the trunk and, suppressing the urge to let out a feral howl, kicked the footlocker as hard as she could.  

“Ow! God damn it!” She said, bringing her foot up to her hand, forcing herself to hop to maintain her balance.  She wanted to cry, but no tears came.  She felt so angry.  She wished Theo was there so she could confront him, beat on his chest with her fists.  Scream at him.  

But he was away in the camp.  Oh God, the camp!  She’d thought him safe there.  Here was a fresh source of torment.  She now had it worse than those women whose husbands were off catching VD in the whorehouses of France.  Hers was locked up with his men.  Had been living with men, their whole marriage.  Those weeks in town.  God, what a blind fool she’d been!  You think because he pays you complement,  buys you presents and takes you to his bed he loves you?  He is a stranger.  A wicked man.  A sinner. To hell with him.

Oh to be able to scream at him now, to confront him.  She imagined Theo trying to defend himself with more lies, rationalizations.  She would show him.  She would take a lover too.  Throw it in his face.  Were it not for the fact that there were no able bodied men under the age of sixty in the village, she would take one tomorrow. But would that really hurt him? What if he didn’t love her?  She could throw him out.  Yes. He loved Karl and Peter she was sure.  Loved their home.  She thought of his projects list.  She could take that away from him.  Keep the house and the boys and shut him out for ever.  Yes. Send him a letter in the camp, tell him it was over.  It would hurt him. Kill him perhaps, a wound that might fester and never heal.   

She shut the footlocker and sat down wearily on top of it, suddenly tired as her rage faded.  She would never do any of it.  It would be monstrous to take her revenge like that, to deprive her sons of their father.  They loved him, looked up to him.  She couldn’t tear him down like that.  She loved them too much to risk them finding out about any of this.  And the idea of continuing alone forever without him was too much.  She had carried on because there was the hope that he would come home.  That they would pick up where they left off.  All that she had done cheerfully, the daily chores, keeping going, living without friends or word from her people was bearable because there was the promise that one day he’d come back to her.   

That was another option too, of course.  Go back to England.  Live with relatives.  Of course she would have to wait till after the war.  No, she shook her head.  She would rather die than go home after all these years, her tail between her legs.  She would carry on, as if all this had never happened.  There was no other choice really.  She began mechanically to put the trunk to rights.  She stacked the things in one by one, folding Clive’s shirt as carefully as Theo could wish and placing it on top.  She thought ruefully that Clive Candy had changed after all, if only in her mind.  If nothing else she would bury those feelings for Clive this night in this little metal coffin. She shut the lid on the whole ordeal.  Theo would know she knew.  They would have to talk.  Sometime.  When he was home.  And he _would_ come home.  If she bit her tongue and kept writing as if none of this had happened, he would come home.  They would deal with it then.

She crept back down the stairs, past Karl’s door, pausing to make sure she hadn’t disturbed him when she had cried out.  Nothing.  She was safe from having to manufacture another lie for him.  She returned to her room, removed her dressing gown and laid it on the chair.  She wasn’t tired, but it was the middle of the night.  There was nothing to do but go to bed.  She slipped under the covers next to Peter.  His breathing hitched and he rolled over.  She reached over, feeling his precious head in her hands, the familiar shape of his skull beneath her hands, petting the soft, scruffy hair as she so often did.  She leaned over and kissed him.  He sighed deeply.  Edith rolled back onto her pillow.  The tears came now, silently burning tracks down her hot cheeks.  She lay motionless for hours until the dark blur before her gradually became light blur. She imagined arguments with Theo, with Clive even, until her head ached and she could think no more about it, at least for the time being.  Her throat was dry and constricted and her lips chapped with crying.  Soon it would be light enough to make her way to the kitchen and start breakfast.  It was Sunday.  They would go to church.  She would smile at the few neighbours who still smiled at her and she would be damned if she’d let them see that she’d passed a sleepless night in grief.  God, she could murder a cup of tea.  

 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [idlesuperstar](http://archiveofourown.org/users/idlesuperstar) for her deft hand at the track changes, unflagging patience, and contribution of numerous lines and ideas.


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